For this pleasure reading I wanted to share two movies that I have watched recently and throughly enjoyed. The first is called Tell No One, a French film from 2006 based on a book by American author Harlan Coben. I've never read any of Coben's novels, in fact before I saw this movie I had never even heard of him, here is a link to his website for more information http://www.harlancoben.com/. After having read more about him and based on how much I liked the film I just might look into reading some of his books. The plot of the movie is a complicated one, it's a thriller first and foremost, but beneath the surface it's more like an intense love story. A man's wife is murdered and eight years later he receives and e-mail that makes him believe she is still alive, what follows is one of the most emotional rides I have ever been on. Most of this emotion is drawn from the soundtrack, which includes Otis Redding, Jeff Buckley, and U2. Now I am a huge Jeff Buckley fan, he could do no wrong in my book, and when his version of "Lilac Wine" started playing in the movie in felt like it was the reason the song was written, it matched the movie so perfectly. After watching the movie it immediately moved into my top 10 maybe even top 5 of the best movies I've ever seen. I highly recommend it to fans of Hitchcock and anyone just looking to enjoy a well written, acted, and made film. Here's the trailer, it does include some nudity so just a heads up.
The next movie is called The Signal, and the genre it belongs to is even harder to pinpoint. Often times funny, scary, bloody, with a touch of mind bending science fiction and romance thrown in, it's impossible to actually categorize this movie. A mysterious signal is being transmitted through people phones, televisions, and radios making them become very violent. I think it's summed up best by a line from the movie. "There's a bad sector in the electromagnetic spectrum which is causing a rift in logical thinking. Rational behavior has given way to primal... primordial action.We've reached a critical juncture in the consistency of everyday living. Societal norms are being completely abandoned. Anarchy has replaced etiquette. Chaos is the ruling class of this civilization, so I think coming to a goddamn New Years Eve party is the last thing on people's minds!"
The trailer makes the movie out to be strictly a thriller, but don't let it fool you although the movie is very thrilling the thrills are smoothed out with dark humor and great characters.
So that's what my pleasure "reading" has been for the past week. Two movies that I really liked and just so happen to have quite a bit to do with technology.
Before reading this article my knowledge of how the internet was created and formed was basically Al Gore. I was reading and I kept wondering when does Gore show up, isn't he always saying he invented the internet. Finally he showed up and to my surprise he really didn't do much, that's not to say what he did wasn't important, but he definitely wasn't as involved as I thought he was. I mean funding could have come from anywhere when you really think about it.
The article itself actually turned out to be a lot more interesting than I had originally expected. I think most of the interest had to do with the way the material was presented, a series of interviews presenting different views from different people all involved in the creation of the internet. It definitely made the information more accessible instead of just reading a journalist's rendering of all of these interviews.
It's surprising to think about how much use everyone gets out of the internet but how little we actually know about it. It's more like this magical network that does what we ask without question and if it doesn't question us why should we question it. So we get this story filled with competition, with AT&T being the unlikely antagonist, and a sense that the people involved knew that what they were doing was going to be big but no one else did. The best way it's described is by Leonard Kleinrock, a professor of computer science at UCLA. He talks about the major accomplishments of 1969 and how with everything that happened that year the last thing anyone was thinking about was the birth of the internet.
The article goes on to discuss all of the recent innovations that deal with the internet and how it's always changing and improving. The internet provides us with more than we actually need, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Politics, music, games, the list goes on and on. I took a class called Media, Power, and Culture last semester and a good majority of that class was spent discussing the impact of the internet and how over the years it has changed our way of life. The internet cannot be ignored and knowing the history of it might just shed some light on the magic of it.
I finished Little Brother yesterday and I have to say that I was very disappointed. Throughout the novel you had Marcus explaining all the neat aspects of technology and I thought that it was all going to come back in the end, but it didn't. The climax was set up perfectly, you had this huge gathering of people wanting to play this weird game and the air was filled with a feeling of revolution, with the idea that something big was going to happen, but it never did. Marcus basically ran away, and then felt really guilty about it so he went back only to be arrested a day or two later. So now I was thinking, "o.k. maybe this book won me back an unhappy ending would fit the reality of the book's world fairly well." Wrong again, instead we get Marcus accepting his fate like he always new this was going to happen and then being miraculously saved by Barbara Stratford. Compared to the other exciting parts of the novel, such as the late night beach meeting and the concert in the park, the ending just didn't hold up. The book dragged on too much only to get to a rushed ending where I no longer really cared about what happened to Marcus. How are you supposed to sympathize with a hero who basically says screw it and then pees his pants? I had pretty high hopes for this book, it had my full attention by the second or third chapter, but after awhile I just couldn't wait for it to end.
The best part of the book I think is the idea behind the book. The idea that this is something that could actually happen. That we should be more aware of the role technology plays in our lives and how much of that role is positive and how much is negative. The book also has the idea of nonconformity going for it. In a world where kids are constantly trying to fit in to groups that already exist, Marcus is someone who starts his own group and still doesn't feel the need to fit in. He rolls with the punches and lives life the way he wants. He could be a role model to children and adults alike. Always stand by your beliefs no matter how difficult the obstacles that stand in your way may be.
I've never met Mark Zuckerberg, nor have I ever wanted to, but after reading this article I hope I never do. He sounds like a terrible person, who may or may not have broken multiple laws to get to where he is today. In summation I think it is terrible that there are people who would abandon and betray others, some who are supposed to be your closest friends, in order to gain success and fame. I actually started getting pretty upset while I was reading the article. A quote from the article that stuck out the most to me was actually a quote from James Boyle the co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. He said, "There are lots of things that an average person might consider reprehensible that aren't against the law." Our morals and values should go further than what the laws provides us with and Zuckerberg's clearly don't.
The technology aspect of the article is pretty amazing though, you use facebook easily enough that you never really think about the time and effort that it might have taken to program the site itself. Much like Marcus (must be the name) in Little Brother, Zuckerberg was a natural when it came to getting computers to work for him. They both used technology so seamlessly it is no wonder they each found success in their own ways. I'm not much help when it comes to computers, I can really only do pretty basic things with them. As this class progresses I find myself becoming more interested in blogging and using similar sites, so we'll see what happens to my computer IQ by the end.
From this article I take more of lesson on morals then technology, but in Zuckerberg's case these things seem to go hand in hand.
